tle.' The meaning of the botanical word is of course,
also, that the central part of a flower-cup has to it something of the
relations that a pestle has to a mortar! Practically, however, as this
pestle has no pounding functions, I think the word is misleading as well as
ungraceful; and that we may find a better one after looking a little closer
into the matter. For this pestle is divided generally into three very
distinct parts: there is a storehouse at the bottom of it for the seeds of
the plant; above this, a shaft, often of considerable length in deep cups,
rising to the level of their upper edge, or above it; and at the top of
these shafts an expanded crest. This shaft the botanists call 'style,' from
the Greek word for a pillar; and the crest of it--I do not know
why--stigma, from the Greek word for 'spot.' The storehouse for the seeds
they call the 'ovary,' from the Latin ovum, an egg. So you have two-thirds
of a Latin word, (pistil)--awkwardly and disagreeably edged in between
pestle and pistol--for the whole thing; you have an English-Latin word
(ovary) for the bottom of it; an English-Greek word (style) for the middle;
and a pure Greek word (stigma) for the top.

17. This is a great mess of language, and all the worse that the words
style and stigma have both of them quite different senses in ordinary and
scholarly English from this forced botanical one. And I will venture
therefore, {78} for my own pupils, to put the four names altogether into
English. Instead of calling the whole thing a pistil, I shall simply call
it the pillar. Instead of 'ovary,' I shall say 'Treasury' (for a seed isn't
an egg, but it _is_ a treasure). The style I shall call the 'Shaft,' and
the stigma the 'Volute.' So you will have your entire pillar divided into
the treasury, at its base, the shaft, and the volute; and I think you will
find these divisions easily remembered, and not unfitted to the sense of
the words in their ordinary use.

18. Round this central, but, in the poppy, very stumpy, pillar, you find a
cluster of dark threads, with dusty pendants or cups at their ends. For
these the botanists' name 'stamens,' may be conveniently retained, each
consisting of a 'filament,' or thread, and an 'anther,' or blossoming part.

And in this rich corolla, and pillar, or pillars, with their treasuries,
and surrounding crowd of stamens, the essential flower consists. Fewer than
these several parts, it cannot have, to be a flower at all;